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One Afghan Top Environmental Official: Increasing Conflict in Afghanistan Related to Ongoing Climate Change
2 November 2021
(EIRNS—Not Arcana)—Samim Hoshmand, a former top Afghan climate official in charge of UNEP’s Ozone section in Afghanistan, recently exiled in Tajikistan, wrote on his twitter account: “When people are facing a natural threat and get hungry, they can do anything. They can cut jungles, destroy ecosystems, deplete natural resources. That’s what I worry about.” Thomson Reuters Foundation reported on Hoshmand’s tweet on Oct. 4. It would appear that Hoshmand’s views are widespread at the UN Environment Programme. When Least Developed Countries (LDCs) experience long periods of war, “the impacts of warming act as what military analysts call threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts over water, putting people out of work in a nation whose people largely live off agriculture, while the conflict itself consumes attention and resources,” reports Sominy Sengupta in an August 30 New York Times story, “A New Breed of Crisis: War and Warming Collide in Afghanistan.” Sengupta then quotes a 2016 United Nations report: “Climate change will make it extremely challenging to maintain — let alone increase — any economic and development gains achieved so far in Afghanistan. Increasingly frequent and severe droughts and floods, accelerated desertification, and decreasing water flows in the country’s glacier-dependent rivers will all directly affect rural livelihoods — and therefore the national economy and the country’s ability to feed itself.” No wonder nobody wanted to discuss the future infrastructure development of Afghanistan, neither at the just concluded G20 Summit nor the ongoing UN COP26 Conference! As for Samim Hoshmand, he gave an interview on Oct. 29 to the CBC Radio program Day 6 with host Peter Armstrong. The 10 minute interview segment can be accessed here: Gilles Gervais |